The Risk Pool Quotes

“My mother had more than once remarked that my father was one of the war's casualties, that the Sam Hall who came back wasn't the one who left, the one she'd fallen in love with. I didn't doubt that she believed this certain truth, or even that it was true, after a fashion. But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth--that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“And so began my final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn't be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawk in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it's away. Return we do, but only to gain momentum for our next outward arc, each further than the last, until there is no elasticity left, nothing to draw us home.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and vague goodwill nevertheless added up.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“She always congratulated herself on the fact that she had nothing to worry about, and wouldn’t have, as long as she continued to worry all the time.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“And yet, right then, as I stood among my father’s friends and acquaintances drinking Mike’s free beer in Sam Hall’s honor, waves of panic as physically tangible as abdominal nausea crashed over me. It wasn’t that I needed Sam Hall for anything specific. I’d have been satisfied to know that his consciousness had somehow been saved, that his essence was being kept alive in some jar on a shelf somewhere, that he continued to be. Of such fears, I thought as I drank off the rest of my beer in a gulp, are religions born. Also alcoholics.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“In my own way, I too was unable to execute his wishes. He’d begged me before I left that afternoon when he’d tried to go home to stay away from the hospital, now that it was just a matter of time. But I couldn’t, and toward the end I saw in his eyes each time that I appeared beside his bed that he was glad to see me, and scared as hell of dying alone. Which he ended up doing anyway. The”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“There was nothing like fear to make democracy real.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“It seemed probable to me that my companion on the bus had lost someone, and that the loss had changed everything, created a truth that could not be modified, only accepted, reread.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don’t know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“She loves you,” he said, then added sadly, “More than anybody.” “I know,” I admitted, suddenly feeling the terrible weight of her love, threatening to rip through the thin fabric of lies and deception that it rested on. “I wish to God she didn’t.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“I just heard Mother in the bathroom,” she said, up on one elbow to smooth hair away from my forehead, a gentle, wonderful intimacy that took my breath away.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“Sometimes,” Tria said, rolling over onto her back again and staring up at the ceiling, “I think that Mother is right about him being empty because I feel so empty myself.” She looked over at me in the semidark with the same scared look she’d had as a girl learning to drive. “Do you ever feel like you’re nobody at all?” “No,” I admitted. “There are times when I feel like I’m somebody I don’t like very much.” “But always somebody,” she said sadly, then added, “I never dislike myself.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“Only the occasional tan brick church survived the general exodus, indeed benefited, to some extent, by the razing of a shabby house or two nearby, so that the church parking lot could be expanded, or some ambitious rector’s plan for a church hall, named in his own honor, be implemented. Thus on Sundays the very people who had long before left the neighborhood to welfare renters returned to shake their perplexed heads at the old neighborhood and wonder how they’d ever managed to live in each other’s laps like that.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“The streets west of Main were older and less symmetrical than those east. They turned around and in upon themselves, as if they’d been laid out by a drunk and then paved by a man who understood him perfectly.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“Yes,” she said, looking off somewhere. “I want … my own true love.” Her own true love. The outrageous simplicity, modesty, and arrogance of it took my breath away. It seemed to me, then and now, a wish that everyone had a right to, but that only the very foolish or the terminally naïve trouble themselves over.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“There’s only one thing in life your mother wants,” my father had often remarked, “her own way.” And somehow now, I realized, I’d suddenly come to share his perverse unwillingness to give her her own way if it could possibly be avoided. I’d probably been doing it in little ways since I could remember, thwarting the will of this woman who derived so little pleasure out of life and seldom wanted more than the occasional public demonstration of loyalty and love, a small enough gift, since the gallery she was playing to was primarily in her own imagination.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“Maybe the bad things didn’t mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“My father’s ideas about debt were vague, cosmic. He figured if you had money and somebody needed some, you gave it to him, at least if the guy was all right and would do the same for you. Later on, if you needed it and he had it you could call on him. In the meantime, if you didn’t need it, you left him alone.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“A bicycle promises spring as surely as the hollowing out of melting snowbanks, the return of song birds, the first bright tulip bud.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“I read some good books that summer, along with a great many bad ones, and I liked them all. Off in my own retreat and my own world,”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“No, you wish. You have to be careful of wishing. It can hurt. It’s better to wait until you know. Waiting for your father to turn up won’t make him do it.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“When someone loves you,” she went on, “you don’t have to wish for it to be so. You just know it is.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“I cannot imagine that my confessions impressed the good Monsignor, but for one reason or another, I was made an altar boy, and thereby brought into the inner sanctum of the church behind the lighted sacristy door. It was a profound disappointment. Nothing mysterious happened there, and if any plotting was done, I wasn’t privy to it.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“Once she started going to church, she couldn’t stop. She attended Mass the way drunks went on binges. She couldn’t get enough. In church she felt safe and secure. Not even my father would dare violate its cool, dark sanctity. She took me along for company.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“Liars” was one of our favorite pastimes. Played with the serial numbers of dollar bills, the game developed some of the same intellectual rigors as handicapping horses. If you said four fives and there were only two fives on your dollar bill, then there had better be two more on the bill your opponent was holding. If there weren’t, and you were called upon to produce the four fives you’d claimed the existence of, you lost your bill. The idea was to trick your opponent into making a claim he’d have to support entirely on his own. If you could convince him that your bill contained, say, threes, and it was in reality devoid of threes, you could challenge him later if he claimed to have an inordinate number of them. It was a wicked little game that placed a premium on confident bluffing, misdirection and rapid analysis of probability.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“Here was a wish from another lifetime, granted twenty-five years too late, as if God were in a place so distant that it took almost forever for wishes to travel there, like pale starlight from a distant galaxy, eons old and all worn out even as we look at it. I”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“The more you had, it seemed to me, the larger your border that needed defending.”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool

“I began to develop a firm conviction that most efforts to teach people things were wasted. All they needed was to go off some place quiet and read. Around”
― Richard Russo, The Risk Pool